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Saving FACEbook!

It the wake of an enormous backlash of user outcry and complaints, Facebook recently apologized to it’s users for conducting emotional experiments on it’s users. Now Facebook is trying to save face and announced new guidelines for their experiment conducting on it’s users. So, now as long as there are “New Guidelines” it’s OK to do emotional testing on your loyal users?

Back in June Facebook conducted one of their infamous studies in which it filled some of it’s users news feeds with positive posts and they filled other users news feeds with negative posts to see what the impact would be on these users subsequent postings on Facebook. This resulted in an unanticipated outcry from it’s users complaining about these experiments that Facebook and done on them unknowingly. The backlash from Facebook’s users caught them by surprise prompting them to respond to it’s users outcry and issue an apology for conducting their emotional experiment on their users.

Besides the apology issued by Facebook, they elaborated or how Facebook will conduct it’s experiments in the future. They have new guidelines on how they will conduct these experiments and a formal review process internally for how studies on sensitive topics like users emotions. Facebook has also announced that they will have a public website that will allow people to keep track of what experiments Facebook is conducting.

Facebook has said that in the future it’s internal study review team will have lawyers, privacy experts as well as engineers to help them better handle these experiments in the future. This all sounds nice and seems to have good intentions, but when you are the one having your emotions played with by a major website like Facebook just to see how you react it just might not be enough to make you feel good enough to hit that “Like” button!

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